Animol Review – A bold young criminal drama that challenges traditional masculinity | film

TThe lawless brutality visited upon a group of young criminals is the setting for this British film written by Marching Powder’s Nick Love and directed by Ashley Walters. It’s a place where terrified newbies realize they can only survive by abandoning their innocence and decency, submitting to the gang’s authority for a psychopath, which naturally involves a gruesome loyalty test.

This is the place where medicines arrive by drone, where men with tattoos on their faces meet cold, vague defiance in the canteen, and where the signs and balls on the pool table in the entertainment area have only one purpose: to grant someone a three-month stay in the hospital ward while underpaid guards in ropes and ill-fitting V-necks look the other way.

Toot Newt plays Troy, who has just arrived on remand on charges of conspiracy to commit murder. After being emotionally corrupted by his neglectful, weak mother Joy (Sharon Duncan Brewster), he immediately forms a bond with Christian (Wladyslaw Paliuk), a shy Polish kid arrested for a chaotic attempt to rob a bookstore, in order to sniff out the glue used to repair the bonds. They are threatened by the fearsome Dion (Sékou Diaby), whose rule they must obey; They’re also wary of the evil Mason (Ryan Dean). Stephen Graham plays Claypool, a youth care worker at the unit.

For me, this film doesn’t quite have the storytelling prowess or plausibility of the similar BAFTA-nominated prison film Wasteman. Graham’s role is a bit too serious, and I honestly didn’t believe in how cathartic the final scene, in which he gathers the inmates to talk to them about their shame, turns out. But this scene, and the film in general, have an idealistic, audacious faith in redeemability (which Westman doesn’t really have) that challenges the genre’s heteromasculinity.

Animol shows us the three types of currencies in the prison world: phones, drugs, and respect. The first two can be flown by drone (people of my generation will smile when they remember the bizarre economy of ‘snout’ cigarettes, AKA cigarettes, in the 1970s BBC comedy series ‘Porridge’); The third is more intangible. Dion assembles and maintains it through an exhausting, never-ending theatrical display of danger, which includes hiring counselors to hang around his cell, who must play off each other as if they were in a Renaissance court. Mason has no talent for leadership. He is a lonely person who cannot help but radiate violent hatred.

But there is a fourth commodity: secrets. Knowing these matters and threatening to reveal them is a dangerous act; The irony here is that blackmail will be a learning process for the prisoners – or almost their coming of age. This is a flawed film, to be sure, but with empathy and strong performances.